Thursday, December 31, 2015

Now, here’s a Top Ten List that’s really funny. Of at least,
it would be hilariously funny if it were not so pathetic.

Apparently, America’s college students have not sense of how
they look to the outside world. They have long since abandoned any concern with
maintaining a good reputation. Evidently, they do not care if anyone, anywhere
ever hires them. They seem to be competing to see who can be the most absurd,
the most ridiculous, the most demented.

If they had entered a contest to see who can best reduce
political correctness to utter absurdity and make themselves look like complete
fools, they would be doing a great job.

Karin Agness has collected a Top Ten List of "Most
Ridiculous College Protests of 2015.”

Read it for the humor; it will make your day. Otherwise you will find yourself overcome with pessimism about the future.

If you would like a sample, here are two:

10. UC San Diego Students “Free the Nipple”

9. California Polytechnic University Students
Hold A “Shit-In”

If you consult the article you
will discover what these students were protesting.

By now everyone knows that Asian students in American
schools are outperforming their non-Asian counterparts academically. The same
holds true for Asians students in Asia. They have become world beaters. Our
students have become also-rans.

Now, Betsy McCaughey suggests, you would think that
non-Asian American parents would want to emulate the example of their Asian
competitors. If the Tiger Mom was so successful and if her counterparts in
other countries are so successful, shouldn’t American parents try to do as she
did?

McCaughey does not mention the Tiger Mom but she does
explain that a goodly part of the success of Asian children comes from their disciplinarian parents and their work-based culture.

As it happens, that is not the American way. The American
way is to try to bring the Asian students down, to malign them and to suggest
that all the hard work will make them neurotic and suicidal. Obviously, deep-think
magazine articles about the neuroticism and depression of Asian children are
psy-ops. They might examine a high school in Stanford, CA and discover a high
level of suicides, fact that may or may not have something to do with having
Tiger Moms. Then again, it may or may not have something to do with living in
an America that demeans children who work all the time and who do not excel at
play dates and sleepovers.

If the calumny is valid, we would also be able to
demonstrate that the world-beating students in Asia are similarly afflicted. And
we would also want to show how badly these countries are doing in economic
competition with the rest of the world.

The studies are a psychic balm for American parents. They are saying
that American parents should not worry when their children fall behind
academically and cannot get jobs in Silicon Valley. They can console themselves
with the notion that their children have higher self-esteem and fewer suicide
attempts. One does not know off-hand how many American children are taking
psychotropic medication, to say nothing of alcohol and weed, but still, making
American children as the gold standard of mental health seems a bit risky. Someone
might counter that we are raising a generation of decadent underachievers. Or, one might say, yet another generation of decadent underachievers.

We do know that Asian students tend not to want to be part
of the ambient American culture. They tend to hang out with each other and to
avoid the Dionysian aspects of high school and college life. Apparently, the
best defense against American decadence is to opt out and spend Saturday night
in the library.

In the meantime colleges are imposing quotas in order to limit
the number of Asian students. And just in case these alarmist stories have not
convinced Tiger Moms to dumb their children down, now a high school in New
Jersey has found a new way to do the job.

McCaughey outlines the problem:

American
teens rank a dismal 28th in math and science knowledge, compared with teens in
other countries — even poor countries. Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan
and Taiwan are at the top.

We’ve
slumped. For the first time in 25 years, US scores on the main test for
elementary and middle school education fell. And SAT scores for college-bound
students dropped significantly.

Could
changes in these tests be to blame? That convenient excuse was torpedoed by the
stellar performances of Asian-American students. Even though many come from
poor or immigrant families, they outscore all other students by large margins
on both tests, and their lead keeps widening.

Here in
New York City, Asian-Americans make up 13 percent of students, yet they win
more than half of the coveted places each year at the city’s selective public
high schools, such as Bronx Science and Stuyvesant.

By any standard, the record is not very good.

The same disparity pertains in a New Jersey high school:

That
formula is under fire at the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District
in New Jersey. The district, which is 65 percent Asian, routinely produces
seniors with perfect SAT scores, admissions to MIT and top prizes in
international science competitions.

Evidently, American parents are upset. They have complained
to school officials. Since, much of what they learned in college was how to
complain and criticize, they are putting their education to good use. Since they
never learned hard work they cannot
impart that value to their children.

Anyway, American parents believe that their darlings are
under too much pressure and cannot compete. The solution: to dumb down the
curriculum. Yes, indeed, that will do it.

McCaughey reports the sad news:

But
many non-Asian parents are up in arms, complaining there’s too much pressure
and their kids can’t compete. In response, this fall Superintendent David
Aderhold apologized that school had become a “perpetual achievement machine.”
Heaven forbid!

Aderhold
canceled accelerated and enriched math courses for fourth and fifth grades,
which were 90 percent Asian, and eliminated midterms and finals in high school.

Using a
word that already strikes terror in the hearts of Asian parents, he said
schools had to take a “holistic” approach. That’s the same euphemism Harvard
uses to limit the number of Asians accepted and favor non-Asians.

Aderhold
even lowered standards for playing in school music programs. Students have a
“right to squeak,” he insisted. Never mind whether they practice.

“Holistic” means that we are not going to accept your high
achieving child because we are afraid that he will not excel at Spring Break.
And because we need to save places to achieve diversity quotas.

One notes with even more chagrin that the school no longer
considers it important to play music correctly. This ought to recall the cries
of anguish when American parents discovered that the Tiger Mom once forced her
young daughter to sit at the piano playing the same piece of music until she
got it right. The poor girl was not even allowed a bathroom break.

In effect, The Tiger Mom was teaching her daughter the
virtue of perseverance.

How did that one work out?

Well, here is the Tiger Cub today.
This is Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld’s bio:

Sophia
Chua-Rubenfeld '15 graduated magna
cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Harvard University with an AB in
Philosophy and South Asian Studies. While at Harvard, Sophia was a recipient of
the Safra Undergraduate Fellowship in Ethics. She was also named (for better or
worse) one of "Harvard's 15 Most Interesting Seniors." Sophia is
currently pursuing her JD at Yale Law School.

One can also add that she completed the Harvard ROTC program
and has set up a tutoring business, called Tiger Cub Tutoring, from which this bio
is drawn. Check out the site.

As you can see, America needs to stop Asian children before
they become like the Tiger Cubs.

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Everyone in the mental health field knows how difficult it
is to treat anorexia. The anorexic refuses to eat. She allows herself to
starve. If you leave her to her own devices she will often die. She does so for
reasons that may be articulate or that may be inarticulate. She might believe
that she is fighting for social justice or she might be suffering from a
dieting habit that has gotten out of control.

Over the years many therapists have tried to treat anorexia
with one or another version of the talking cure. They have usually failed. They
have found, over the years, that what succeeds is something very close to
forced feeding. From the Maudsley Hospital in England to many institutions in
America, the best treatment seems to be: forcing anorexics to eat, and to eat
more than they want to eat.

It is an unpleasant and painful treatment, because by the
time these girls become hospitalized they have damaged their digestive systems
to the point where they have great difficulty and even pain digesting food. In
the end, however, it is better to undergo the treatment involuntarily than to
starve to death. In many cases those are the alternatives. Take your choice.

It is fair to say that anorexics are defiant. It is fair to
say that they are being deprived of some of their freedom because their choices
are killing them. Of course, we can also ask whether their judgment has been impaired
by the damage their anorexia might have done to their brains.

Once they get caught up in the anorexia they often seek ways
to rationalize it, to make it meaningful. As a civilized society we do not
accept that we should allow people to starve themselves to death in order to
make a point.

Still, anorexics are defiant. The more defiant they are the
more difficult they are to treat. The more defiant they are the more likely they
are to become chronically ill, to take up the habit as soon as she leaves
treatment… the better to assert what she considers her autonomy and
independence.

Anorexics do not need is to hear people praising their
defiance, encouraging them to starve themselves, telling them that defiance is
a the right thing to do to gain social justice. Yet, that is what a recovering
anorexic named Carrie Arnold proposes in an article in Aeon. The article is
entitled: “In Praise of Defiance.”

One sympathizes with the fact that Arnold suffered from
anorexia herself. Yet, that is not an excuse for writing an article in which
she seems to be enabling defiant anorexics.

To be blunt, the article is a wrong-headed muddle,
conflating anorexics who are being forced to eat in order to survive with psychiatric
prisoners in the Soviet Union and China and also with rioters in America’s
inner cities..

In one were to ask why Arnold and the patient she calls
Holly continue to be anorexic, the answer is that they are defiant. They value
defiance because they think it represents a rebellion against the system. They
are willing to sacrifice their health for a principle. They think that they are
martyrs for social justice. In truth they are tools of those who overestimate
the value of ideals. The one thing that Arnold and Holly do not need is social
support and encouragement. They are not prisoners in the Gulag or in a Russian
psychiatric hospitals and they are absurdly wrong to confuse their mental
health issues with political persecution.

I will admit that treating defiant anorexics is not pretty.
Allowing them to starve themselves to death isn’t pretty either. Since Arnold offers no other solution, she should not be defending the mental mechanism that
causes these girls to become and to remain anorexic.

How ugly was the treatment? After refusing to eat the last
piece of toast Holly was subjected to a gruesome punishment. Arnold describes
it:

As a
patient at an eating-disorder treatment centre, Holly was required to finish
everything on her plate or drink a high-calorie liquid supplement. Already
uncomfortably full after eating everything else, she couldn’t finish the slice
of toast. A nurse reminded her of the rule: toast or supplement. She tried to
explain that it was only her fourth day in treatment and she had already eaten
nearly twice what she had been eating at home. The nurse insisted. Finally,
Holly admitted: ‘I can’t. I’m scared.’

But the
facility didn’t see fear, it saw defiance. In her panic, Holly had pushed a
nurse out of the way, which was written down as a physical assault on staff. So
the treatment centre transported Holly to a locked psychiatric ward where she
was held against her will for the next five days. She was restrained, drugged,
and humiliated, all of which gave Holly flashbacks and nightmares. Only after
stuffing herself full of food for two days straight to convince the hospital
that she wasn’t a danger to herself or to others was she released.

‘Defiant
or not, as a patient, I have the right to participate in my own care, and that
was taken from me,’ she said.

As I said, it sounds gruesome. Be clear, however. Holly
could leave at any time she wanted to… by eating a few meals.

Arnold adds that Holly has been undergoing treatment for
depression and anxiety for two decades now. How well has this defiance been
working for her? True enough, the treatment appears to be unjust, but people
who are a danger to themselves are not allowed to make decisions that will harm
them. We do not allow them to slit their wrists either because they believe
that it will be a good way to protest injustice.

But, Arnold seems to see Holly as a martyr for freedom.
Certainly, that is how Holly sees herself:

In
nearly two decades of treatment for depression and eating disorders, Holly has
frequently been called defiant. She doesn’t hesitate to stand her ground and
state her opinion, even if it makes people uncomfortable. Her shaved head and
multiple piercings and tattoos add to her defiant image. Holly doesn’t deny
that the word applies to her – after all, she tried to enlist the help of the
American Civil Liberties Union in suing her high school on the grounds that
their community service requirement violated the 14th Amendment. Her problem is
that the only thing people can see is defiance.

Why do people only see defiance? Perhaps because that is all
there is to see.

Holly does not need social support. She needs to learn that
she should not be martyring herself for a cause. She needs to have less, not more support.
She does not need published articles defending her right to starve herself to
death. She does not need serious writers encouraging her and other girls to be antisocial. Arnold should not be telling them that they are right to be defiant.

And then, Arnold, who doesn’t think very clearly herself,
launches into a litany of grievances, all of which represent society’s unjust
repression of people who are rebelling for a good cause.

She writes:

And
when the defiant ones are locked up in prisons and hospitals, they are unable
to force changes in the status quo – not only do they lack control over the
treatment dispensed, they are also unable to express their change-making views
on culture and the world. And what a loss: without people protesting police
shootings of unarmed black men in Ferguson and Baltimore, racial violence will
continue. Without sexual assault victims speaking out against how they were
blamed for crimes committed against them, rape culture will go on. Defiance
forces us to chip away at the cornerstones of our culture, but it’s all too
easy to turn our discomfort into the defiant ones’ psychiatric disease.

As you can see Arnold has embraced the dogmatic beliefs of
the crackpot left. She sounds like a standard issue grievance monger.

What happened in Ferguson, MO has nothing to do with what
she says happened. If she believes that the protests and riots are going to
stop racial violence, she is obviously out of touch with reality. By now,
everyone should know that most of the violence in those communities is produced
by minority group members themselves. And that demonizing the police has caused
more, not less violence.

As for the rape culture meme, Arnold shows herself to be
equally empty headed. If she does not understand the complex causes for rape
culture on and off campus and does not understand how many times men have been
unjustly accused of rape and expelled from school for it, she understands
nothing. And she certainly does not see that rape is a relatively rare
occurrence on college campuses, compared with other parts of our society.

Naturally, she rallies to the cause of one Emma Sulkowicz,
the mattress girl who insisted that she had been raped. Both Arnold and
Sulkowicz are so defiant that they refuse to accept the administrative and
legal judgments about the validity of Sulkowicz’s charge. It could be that
Sulkowicz was right and that every objective individual who evaluated her claim
was wrong. Should we praise her defiance for believing that her feelings and
beliefs should trump the rule of law.

Arnold writes:

Acts of
defiance can be solitary or small. High-school students defy social norms by
openly defining themselves as gay, bisexual or transgender. Office workers defy
corporate culture by brightly decorating their cubicles. Fat-acceptance
activists refuse to change their weight for the sake of appearance. Defiance
defines the visual arts student Emma Sulkowicz, who carried her mattress around
Columbia University in New York City in protest at how they handled her sexual
assault.

Keep in mind, Sulkowicz also produced an explicitly
pornographic video of what she said happened to her. Again, she wanted to martyr
herself for a cause, but no officials, either within the college or the police,
found her claim to be credible. In the meantime she allowed the world to see
her as a political fanatic. Surely, it will have an effect on her future
prospects, both dating and employment prospects. We ought not to extol her, to
make her a role model for young women everywhere. Unless we want to be
enablers.

Let’s try to shed some reason on this. When it comes to
schizophrenia and certain other kinds of mental illnesses, it is extremely difficult
to commit patients involuntarily. Surely, this is not a good thing. When the
civil libertarians took control of the commitment process, they threw up
obstacles to the involuntary commitment of people like Adam Lanza, Jared
Loughner and James Holmes. All of them were clearly schizophrenic. People
around them knew that they needed to be treated, against their defiant will. Tragically, the law made it that nothing could be done.

Holmes’s psychiatrist knew what was coming but could not get
him committed against his will. Lanza’s mother knew what was happening, but in
Connecticut it was very difficult to have her son committed.

For now, it is easier to commit and to treat adolescent
girls who are suffering from eating disorders.

While you are singing the praises of the defiantly mentally
ill, keep in mind that defiance is not an unalloyed virtue. There is
no real virtue to starving yourself to death or to burning down your
neighborhood.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

The American people are angry. They are frustrated. As
calamity engulfs the world they see their president adopting a “What Me Worry?”
attitude.

Worse yet, they hate being lied to. They hate being lied to,
over and over again, without anyone really caring. It’s
an old tactic used by totalitarian propagandists. You keep telling the same lie
until people have heard it so much that they assume it to be true.

Back in the day, during the Bush administration, the media
was abuzz over the idea that Bush had lied. Everyone was aghast that the
president had said that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but
then could not find any. Everyone assumed it was a lie.

The reason they thought so was that they do not know what a
lie is. They did not see that Bush was merely presenting the best intelligence
estimates gleaned from the world’s best intelligence agencies. The estimates were wrong, but there is such a thing as an honest mistake. And making an honest
mistake is not the same as a lie.

You recall that a dimwitted comedian made his way into the
United States Senate by writing a book entitled: Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Evidently, he has a
limited vocabulary. And yet, the concept took hold and America elected a
president who promised to disengage from Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle
East. Thanks to the constant attacks on Bush’s truthfulness, coupled with the fact
that the war was not going very well, the American people voted for a cowardly
pacifist who wanted to reach out to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian mullahs.

And, of course, Barack Obama was an exceptionally good liar.
Obama and his media enablers see no reason to tell the American people the
truth. They simply kept saying that if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor and that if you like
your plan you can keep you plan… knowing all along that it was a gigantic lie.

And we have an administration that forces intelligence
officers to skew the data in order to make it appear that Obama’s fabrications
about ISIS and Islamic terrorism are true. Not only does Obama circumvent the
constitution by acting like a despot. He continues to lie about it.

Better yet, the Democrat party, having seen how successful
you can be by lying to the American people, is on the verge of nominating a
candidate who is an equally competent liar.

Now, Slate Magazine, hardly a hotbed of conservative
thought, has caught the Obama State Department in an especially egregious lie.
You see, John Kerry and his spokesman John Kirby have put out a list of the
administration’s 2015 foreign policy achievements.

One has no idea what John Kirby, a retired admiral is
thinking, but his performance makes you nostalgic for the old days of Jen Psaki
and Marie Harf—at least they were good looking.

Anyway, the Obama-Kerry-Kirby progress report touts the
administration’s victory in providing Iran with eventual legitimate access to
nuclear weapons and immediate access to over a hundred billion dollars. As it
happened, Iran did not even sign the deal and does not feel bound to respect it.
If that is your greatest achievement you are a failure and ought to bow your head in shame.

And the state department touts a climate change agreement in
which all of the world’s nations agreed on nothing. The agreement is
worth precisely nothing. It requires nothing of anyone and will never be
submitted to the Senate for approval. For the Obama administration the climate change agreement will
aid in the fight against Islamist terrorism.

But, these were not even the most egregious distortions. The
biggest lie concerns Syria. Something must be seriously wrong with officials
who imagine that anyone would accept this assessment as the truth. Sadly, the
administration knows very well that the lapdog media will happily look away
from reality and will offer up yet another paean on gun control.

Yet, this time, Slate has called the administration out.

The Obama/Kerry/Kirby version was entitled: "Bringing Peace
and Security to Syria.” Really, I could not have made this up:

The
United States and many members of the international community have stepped up
to aid the Syrian people during their time of need – the United States has led
the world in humanitarian aid contributions since the crisis began in 2011. Led
by Secretary Kerry, the United States also continues to push for a political
transition in Syria, and under his stewardship, in December, the UN Security
Council passed a U.S.-sponsored resolution that puts forward a roadmap that
will facilitate a transition within Syria to a credible, inclusive,
nonsectarian government that is responsive to the needs of the Syrian people.

Being a responsible journalistic organ, one that has just
seen its faith betrayed, Slate counterpoints the Obama/Kerry/Kirby version with
a description from Foreign Policy:

According
to the United Nations, as of October 2015 some 250,000
people have been killed in more than four years of civil war (casualty figures
for 2015 alone are not yet available). More than 11 million refugees
have left the region, many of whom swelled onto European shores in the fall of
2015; it’s not clear how many will ever get asylum in Europe, or elsewhere
around the world, including in the United States. A March 2015 UN report also noted that four in five Syrians are now
living in poverty.

Slate concludes by quoting the author of that piece:

“[I]n
the case of Syria, the five words State used to describe the past year seem at
the very least inappropriate and at the worst delusional,” Foreign Policy’s David Francis writes.

Delusional… the word refers to a belief that is so strong
that it is impervious to rational consideration or factual verification. A
schizophrenic who hears God will never believe that God is not speaking to him. A
paranoiac who believes in a vast conspiracy will never be persuaded that there
is no such thing.

Delusional beliefs do not need to be limited to psychotics.
There are people out there who believe that their left leg is longer than their
right leg and that the condition can only be cured by amputation. Since we can
measure legs in a way that we cannot measure God, we know that they are
deluded. Nevertheless, if you do not accept their belief you are a bigot.

And then there was the woman who came to believe that God
had make a mistake by giving her eyesight. She convinced a therapist to pour
drain cleaner in her eyes, thus blinding her. She says that she has never been
happier.

And, let’s not forget Caitlyn Jenner. In a world founded on delusional
lies, she-he-it is clearly the king/queen.

I will spare you my comments here since most of this is beyond
my area of competence. But, we should pay attention to Michael Burry’s views on
America’s current economic conditions, just because he is Michael Burry.

You recall Michael Burry? He was a leading character in the
Michael Lewis book (now a major motion picture) called The Big Short. Way back before the crash of 2008 Burry found a way
to short mortgage backed securities. He made a fortune in the crash, so he is
worth reading… whether he is right or wrong.

How does he see the financial crisis now? He had hoped that
the players in the government and business would have taken personal
responsibility for what happened. And yet, they simply shifted the blame. It’s
an important theme around here, so it is interesting to see how Burry explains
what happened:

The
biggest hope I had was that we would enter a new era of personal responsibility.
Instead, we doubled down on blaming others, and this is long-term tragic. Too,
the crisis, incredibly, made the biggest banks bigger. And it made the Federal
Reserve, an unelected body, even more powerful and therefore more relevant. The
major reform legislation, Dodd-Frank, was named after two guys bought and sold
by special interests, and one of them should be shouldering a good amount of
blame for the crisis. Banks were forced, by the government, to save some of the
worst lenders in the housing bubble, then the government turned around and
pilloried the banks for the crimes of the companies they were forced to
acquire. The zero interest-rate policy broke the social contract for
generations of hardworking Americans who saved for retirement, only to find
their savings are not nearly enough. And the interest the Federal Reserve pays
on the excess reserves of lending institutions broke the money multiplier and
handcuffed lending to small and midsized enterprises, where the majority of job
creation and upward mobility in wages occurs. Government policies and
regulations in the postcrisis era have aided the hollowing-out of middle
America far more than anything the private sector has done. These changes even
expanded the wealth gap by making asset owners richer at the expense of
renters. Maybe there are some positive changes in there, but it seems I fail to
see beyond the absurdity.

And Burry points out that those who borrowed money at zero
interest rates are also to blame. It recalls a remark I made recently about
affirmative action programs. Just because you can get into Harvard or Yale
under an affirmative action program does not mean that you have to go to
Harvard or Yale.

In Burry’s words:

If a
lender offers me free money, I do not have to take it. And if I take it, I
better understand all the terms, because there is no such thing as free money.
That is just basic personal responsibility and common sense. The enablers for
this crisis were varied, and it starts not with the bank but with decisions by
individuals to borrow to finance a better life, and that is one very loaded
decision. This crisis was such a bona fide 100-year flood that the entire world
is still trying to dig out of the mud seven years later. Yet so few took
responsibility for having any part in it, and the reason is simple: All these
people found others to blame, and to that extent, an unhelpful narrative was
created. Whether it’s the one percent or hedge funds or Wall Street, I do not
think society is well served by failing to encourage every last American to
look within. This crisis truly took a village, and most of the villagers
themselves are not without some personal responsibility for the circumstances
in which they found themselves. We should be teaching our kids to be better
citizens through personal responsibility, not by the example of blame.

The problem, as he sees it, is debt. Because one of these
days we will either have to pay it off or default on it. While many politicians
believe that we grow our way out of debt, others, like central bankers--and maybe even Paul Krugman-- believe
that we can inflate our way out of it.

Burry explains:

The
idea that growth will remedy our debts is so addictive for politicians, but the
citizens end up paying the price. The public sector has really stepped up as a
consumer of debt. The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is leveraged 77:1. Like I
said, the absurdity, it just befuddles me.

If I had to speculate I would say that a goodly majority of
physicians does not thrill when patients do Google searches about their
symptoms.

The poet said: “A little learning is a dangerous thing” and
it is probably true that googling your symptoms will produce more anxiety than
light. Best to consult with a physician before jumping to what is likely to be
the wrong conclusion.

Speaking of truthiness, Paul Krugman has assured us that
socialized medicine is the best of all possible worlds. You do not think that
the Nobel prize-winning polemicist could be skewing the facts, do you? I am
referring to Krugman’s often quoted line that all the horror stories about the
British National Health Service are false.

In Krugman’s words:

In Britain, the government itself runs the
hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that
works in practice; these stories are false.

One should not fail to note that
Krugman had also argued, several years earlier, that the Veterans
Administration should be the role model for American health care. How did that
one work out, Kruggy?

Today, we discover, to everyone’s chagrin, that a young British woman’s Google searches provided better information than
her physicians in the National Health Service hospital in Nottingham. And that her physicians ignored the information.

The nineteen-year old was named
Bronte Doyne. The London Telegraph reported the story a few months ago:

A
teenager who begged doctors to take her health fears seriously in the months
before she died from a rare cancer was told by medics to "stop Googling
your symptoms".

Bronte
Doyne died on March 23, 2013, aged 19 - just 16 months after she first
complained of severe stomach pains.

In text
messages, tweets and personal diary entries, the student expressed her worries
that medics were not acting as her health deteriorated.

Doctors
dismissed her concerns, leaving her desperate for someone to take her seriously….

Finally,
after pleading to be taken seriously, she was admitted to hospital where she
passed away 10 days later.

Now
bosses at the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust have admitted they
"did not listen with sufficient attention" and that they must embrace
the "internet age".

The NHS physicians thought that she was hysterical. They
were wrong. They now believe that they need to enhance their listening skills.
Their patient died. Apparently, in the NHS no one is held accountable.

Were there any indications that Doyne might really be very
ill? In fact, there were. She was being treated for liver cancer.

The Telegraph writes:

Miss
Doyne, of West Bridgford, Nottingham, was first admitted to hospital in
September 2011 with suspected appendicitis. But she was eventually told she had
fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma, which affects only 200 people globally
each year.

The
family found information about the cancer on a website endorsed by the US
government and discovered it had a high chance of recurrence but, when they
raised the issue, doctors told them to stop searching the internet for
information.

She
said: "Bronte was denied pain relief, referrals were hugely delayed and
efforts by her family to gather information and understand Bronte's prognosis
were handled in an evasive and aloof manner.

"Her
fears that her symptoms over the preceding months before she died were
cancer-related were proved right. The messages from Bronte are all her own words
and I believe that's more powerful for people to understand what she went
through. I want to see changes and action now."

We understand that her cancer was very rare. And we
understand that she might have died anyway, even with the best treatment.

Yet, that is not an excuse for ignorance and incompetence.
The information was available to anyone who wanted to check on it. One
appreciates that the parents are grieving, but we cannot fail to notice that
the problem was not a lack of empathy… it was her physicians’ arrogance,
cockiness and sloth. And that assumes a certain level of competence. Do you
think that a government run health care system attracts the best and the
brightest?

The physicians told Bronte and her parents that the cancer was
in remission. The American website suggested that their view was overly
optimistic.

Mrs
Doyne said they were led to believe the surgery would cure the cancer but the
online information suggested otherwise.

She
added: "We asked after the surgery if they were suspicious the cancer
could come back but their response was 'how will that help Bronte?' We were
told they will be seeing her over the next 20 years - it made her feel relieved
but she still didn't feel quite right.

"We
weren't given any information by the hospital about this but we did know it had
a really poor outcome, yet they did nothing and just left us to wait and
dismissed her concerns."

The Telegraph continues:

She
underwent liver resection surgery in December 2011. But 11 months later, after
doctors had told her she was fine, she wrote in her diary In November 2012:
"Feeling sick for months now. Tired of this feeling crap. Hospital not
worried so trying to get on with it."

Six
weeks before her death, she was advised by her GP to go to hospital as an
emergency case if her symptoms worsened.

But
when she got to Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre, Miss Doyne was told by a
doctor that she did not need to be seen.

She
wrote: "I got so angry because the doctor was so rude and just shrugged
his shoulders. He gave me a sarcastic comment like you can sleep here if you
want but they won't do anything. So I just have to wait for another hospital
appointment."

One is struck by the insouciance of these
physicians. They seemed not to care about a seriously ill patient, whose
initial complaint was decidedly not hysteria. After the patient died, the
physicians and the bureaucrats still seemed not to care. They thought the
problem was communication, not competence.

And they seem radically incapable of doing their jobs. It’s
a frightening scenario. If people like Prof. Krugman have their way it will
soon be coming to a hospital near you.

Monday, December 28, 2015

Congratulations are in order. To me, this time. This blog has just made Doug Ross’s list of the Top Fifty conservative blogs. I am proud and humbled,
simultaneously, which is not very easy. As you will see, when you read the list, this blog is in excellent company.

My thanks to Doug Ross for this recognition. It is very much appreciated.

Want to ruin your marriage? Want to help divorce lawyers to
earn a living? The latest study, from a group of London lawyers, tells us that the
best way to ruin your marriage is… bad habits. It’s even better than adultery.

‘Unreasonable
behaviour’ was the main ground in 54 per cent of divorces granted to wives in
England and Wales last year, while adultery accounted for 13 per cent,
according to the Office of National Statistics.

I will bet that you did not know that it was that easy to
ruin your marriage. Only in Great Britain would they call boorish, lewd, rude
and crude behavior “unreasonable.” Hats off to the Brits.

This also implies that connubial bliss has more to do with
having good habits than it does, for example, in having good sex. Of course,
this implies that bad habits are not very good for your sex life. If you are
out of sync during the day you will likely remain out of sync at night. If
your habits are bad enough, your sometime spouse will not be overly displeased
that you are rutting elsewhere.

But, which bad habits are the worst? The Daily Mail reports
the survey:

Many of
the unwelcome habits reflect the internet playing a greater part in couples’
lives, with complaints surrounding use of online gambling, pornography and
shopping.

But
other halves were also accused of being condescending, using patronising
nicknames or calling housekeeping allowances ‘pocket money’.

Some
even revealed dogs, cats or horses were put before their husband or wife.

More
unusual was a refusal to allow a spouse to watch television channels with an
odd number.

Considering that divorce is a major problem, especially as
broken homes (see previous post) damage children, it is worth giving a little
extra thought to the problem identified here.

Surely, a number of these habits fall in the category of
sloth. People seem to believe that once they are married they do not need to
take care of themselves. They embarrass each other through their bad hygiene or
bad behavior. Nothing will damage a marriage more than behavior that embarrasses your spouse.

Then again, most of these soon-to-be-divorced couples seem
to be living together as though they are living alone.

One does not have the full set of data, but it is commonly recognized
that couples today are marrying later. Why are they doing so? Because feminism
told them to do so.

Feminists suggested that people who marry later are more
likely to make a better choice of spouse and to choose a spouse for reasons
that have less to do with economic dependence and more to do with love.

What could be better than two autonomous, independent human
monads that go bump in the night, who share all household chores and who change
an equal number of diapers?

What could be better? A marriage, for example.

In any event, it must have seemed like a great idea. Two human
monads would naturally have a happier marriage. They would be marrying for
love. What could go wrong?

In truth, a lot went wrong. Primarily, feminists overlooked
the fact that when couples marry later in life they have already developed some
seriously ingrained bachelor habits. Having been functioning perfectly well in resplendent
singlehood, they find that it is not that easy to live as a couple.

If you retain your bachelor habits, you are acting as though
your spouse is not there. In more than a few cases a spouse who acts as though
his or her spouse is not there will eventually find that his or her spouse is
not there.

Sometimes people do not know that they are required, as the
price of admissions in a marriage, to modify many of their personal habits, the
better to create a series of couple habits and couple routines. They do not
know, because no one told them, that these new habits and routines should be
observed religiously all the time… the better to create a feeling of solidarity
and security. It’s the best way to transition from Me to We.

If you want to wreck your marriage, however, you should hold
on to your bachelor routines. Play as many video games as you want. Watch all
the internet porn you like. Show up for meals when you feel like it.

Act as though you are living alone and you will soon be
living alone.

People have difficulty changing their habits because habits
are difficult to change. It takes effort. It takes time. It does not just
happen overnight. If you think that marriage is all about love and that your
love will solve all problems and salve all wounds you should start saving up
for your divorce lawyer.

Of course, we do not know why home life for the soon-to-be
divorced is so difficult. We suspect that one or the other spouse is conducting
his or her marriage the way one specific ideology dictates. After all, feminism
has often handed out advice about how to conduct a marriage. If so, feminism
bears some responsibility when these new modern marriages end up in divorce
court.

It’s about rules and roles. If a man has been brought up by a
mother who cared for him, he will have difficulty adjusting to having a wife
who won’t. He might revert to some of his old bachelor and teenage habits and
not participate in household chores.

I do not know whether these man-boys who spend all their
time in front of their computers are reverting to the norm of their bachelor
days or are trying to induce their wives to take charge of the household, but,
either way, making your marriage a terrain on which you are fighting the
culture wars will put you on the road to divorce.

Children
who have grown up in broken homes are three times more likely to experience
mental health problems, according to a new study.

Research
by the University College London found that 6.6 per cent of children living
with both biological parents suffered from mental health problems.

This is
compared to some 15 per cent of children with a single parent and 18.1 per cent
of children living with step-families.

Although
the causes are not yet known, experts suggest that the family breakdown can
lead to the child falling into poverty or growing up in a high-stress
environment.

Well
and good. For now, we do not need to know why a child brought up by a single
parent or even by step parents will suffer mental health consequences. It is
good to recognize that, given the option, broken homes are bad for children. It
is perhaps even more interesting to note that living in a family with step
parents is even worse than living with a single parent.

The research emphasizes the importance of family stability,
of clearly defined and consistent routines. And it puts the lie to the notion
that love is enough and that divorce does not harm children. This does not mean that no one should ever divorce, but that those who contemplate such a move should give serious consideration to the effect it will have on their children.

The Daily Mail continues:

‘This
study adds to a mountain of evidence that family stability matters and family
breakdown can have a damaging effect on the mental health of children,’ Norman
Wells, from the Family Education Trust, told The Telegraph.

‘The
fact that a growing number of children lack the advantages of being raised by
both their biological parents in a stable family unit is not something we can
afford to be complacent about.’

Researchers suggest that we revise our views of how we conduct
our lives. Those of us who are parents should discard the notion that we should
seek personal fulfillment, regardless of the effect it has on other people,
especially on vulnerable children:

‘In an
age that places great emphasis on personal fulfilment at all costs, this study
is a salutary reminder that the personal choices we make can have a lasting
impact on others and especially on our children.’

The
study – based on more 10,448 11-year-olds in the UK – found that children in
step-families were also 19.5 per cent more likely to have tantrums and get into
fights than children with both biological parents.

When the study broke down the results by race it discovered
that white boys are more prone to being hyperactive and by misbehaving. It also
suggested that those who fare the worst in mental health terms are mixed race
girls:

Meanwhile,
white boys were the most likely to suffer hyperactivity and conduct problems,
and mixed race girls were the most likely to suffer from any type of severe
mental health problem.

Sunday, December 27, 2015

Beware the tech oligarchs. It feels slightly alarmist but it
is not an exaggeration. Considering the amount of wealth they have accumulated
at a very young age the potential for the tech oligarchs to do damage grows by
the day.

With
their massive, and early, accumulated wealth, the tech oligarchs will dominate
us long after the inheritors have financed the last art museum or endowed the
newest hospital. Two decades from now, many tech oligarchs will still be young
enough to be counting their billions and thinking up new ways to ‘disrupt’ our
lives – for our own good, of course.

Nicely said. Those who want to run your life, thus to
disrupt it, always say that it’s for your own good. Of course, they assume that
they know better than you do how to conduct your life.

Part of the issue, Kotkin analyzes masterfully, lies in the
fact that the oligarchs function like feudal lords. They do not provide
economic opportunity for the many, but prefer to buy the political allegiance
of the great unwashed by handing out freebees. It's the story of today's California.

The new
political configuration works in classic medieval fashion, with the rich
providing the necessities for the poor, without providing them opportunity for
upward mobility or the chance, God forbid, to buy a house in the outer suburbs.
With the fading of California’s once powerful industrial economy – Los Angeles
has lost much of its manufacturing base over the past decade – its working
classes now must be mollified by symbolic measures, such as energy rebates,
subsidised housing and the ever illusive chimera of ‘green jobs’.

This
‘upstairs-downstairs’ California coalition could presage the country’s
political future. Perhaps it’s best to think of it as a form of high-tech
feudalism, in which the upper classes run the show, but bestow goodies on the
struggling masses. This alliance will allow the present tech oligarchs to
thrive without facing a populist challenge that could interfere with their
profits and expansion into other markets.

And if you ask yourself what precisely Facebook contributes
to the economy, how it enhances productivity, creates new jobs or even helps to
distribute information you will come up with precious little. In fact, Facebook
has become very rich by becoming the leading vanity media company. And what could
be more vain than Facebook’s list of four dozen gender identities. One shudders
to imagine that the people who run that company actually believe in their list.

More importantly, for now, the oligarchs have committed
themselves to give away tens of billions of dollars to promote leftist causes.

Kotkin writes:

… the
oligarchs, as they have become ever richer, are clearly moving leftwards. In
2000, the communications
and electronics sector was basically even in its donations; by 2012,
it was better than two to one Democratic. Microsoft, Apple and Google – not to
mention entertainment companies – all overwhelmingly lean to
the Democrats with their donations.

There
seems a natural affinity between President Obama, who sees himself as a force
for transformation, and the tech oligarchs, who love ‘disruption’. Each shares
a high estimate of their basic intelligence and foresight; it is an alliance of
those who feel they should own and shape the future.

By Kotkin’s analysis, it makes perfectly good sense that
these oligarchs would skew leftwards. Doubtless, their beliefs are sincere, but
one has to wonder, to put it bluntly, about who is controlling their minds. If
they believe that they think for themselves they are suffering from a common
illusion… only on a grander scale.

After all, tech oligarchs are not intellectuals. They may
think that they own the world; they may think that they own all of your private
information; but they do not know philosophy. They are certainly opinionated,
but opinion and knowledge are not the same thing.

Being very rich and very young they are easily seduced by smooth
talking intellectuals. They are more vulnerable because they are undoubtedly persuaded
of their own infallibility.

I suspect that people who have gotten that rich that young
lack basic humility. This might set them up to be tragic heroes, done in by
their hubris, but it also makes them vulnerable to philosophers who can and
have seduced them into believing just about anything.

Considering how much of their money will be sloshing through
the system to finance leftist causes we should want to know how these tech
oligarchs had their minds seduced.

For example, Sheryl Sandberg has offered women some
powerfully bad advice in her crusade for Leaning In. She has allowed women to
believe that what really matters in negotiations over compensation is: posturing. Note well that “leaning in” is a posture. As Sandberg’s friend Jill
Abramson, formerly of the New York Times, discovered, leaning in can cost you
your job and your career.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg is pretending to show the world how
wonderful it is to take paternal leave, to take time off from Facebook in order
to change diapers. The truth of the matter is that Zuckerberg’s is a supremely
arrogant gesture. He is showing that if you own the company you can do what you
damn well please and no one can say anything about it. Yet, everyone knows that
any other man who takes time off to change diapers will lose the respect of his
colleagues and will lose out on promotions and bonuses. He will pay dearly for
his political correctness.

But, ask yourself this: what made Zuckerberg an
authoritative voice on gender politics? Nothing, in particular, you might say. Doesn’t
he have a job? And shouldn’t he be doing it? And yet, he presumes to be setting
an example for fatherhood, an example that very, very few other men can afford.

Or else, take the example of a less than youthful
information tycoon, Michael Bloomberg. As you know, Bloomberg has become a
crusader for gun control. He is totally committed to the cause. He is spending
a lot of money—perhaps not for him, but for you and me it would be a lot of
money—trying to disarm America.

One assumes that someone at some time convinced him, by
impeccable logic, that if no one had guns then there would be no gun violence.
One understands that such a thought can congeal into a conviction, even a
dogma.

But then, Americans own nearly 300,000,000 guns, so
militating against gun ownership is like tilting at windmills.

Besides, Bloomberg and other gun control advocates ignore
the fact that someone is pulling the triggers on these guns. Calling for gun
control and blaming the NRA absolves the shooters of moral responsibility for
their actions. In fact, if these shooters come to believe that their actions
will serve to indict the NRA, they might have a reason to commit gun crimes.

Crusaders absolve people of moral responsibility for mass murder, as
happened after the San Bernardino massacre when the president and the New York
Times responded by saying that the real problem was not Islamist extremists or
even ISIS but the NRA. I am astonished that the Times reaction to the terrorist
act was a front page call for unilateral disarmament.

People who are extremely rich, whether they are or are not
young, are especially vulnerable to mental seduction. The technique was
invented by Socrates. He was surely its master.

And doesn’t Platonism offer membership in a class of
guardians, or philosopher-kings who can make decisions for all the rest of us. Why limit yourself to being a tech oligarch when you can be a philosopher-king?

Socratic dialogues are complex and brilliant
seductions. Their do not show how Socrates
imparted knowledge to the rubes who found themselves dialoguing with him, but they
show how a philosopher can seduce you into believing something that makes no
sense. Something that makes no sense is effectively nonsense.

Socrates persuaded people that we never see real objects in
the world, but that we can only see appearances. Another great Socratic philosopher,
Freud persuaded no small number of people that their sole desire in life was to
copulate with their mothers. A philosopher clown like Slavoj Zizek spews
gibberish and watches his hapless followers fall over themselves to proclaim its
brilliance. Since they do not understand it, they think that it is that much
more brilliant. What counts is not whether it is brilliant, but whether it
appears to be so.

It is always possible, to take a clearer example, for a
prosecutor in a criminal trial to introduce evidence that appears to show that Col. Mustard killed Mr. Boddy in the library
with a candlestick. But, appearances can be deceiving, and if Col. Mustard was
in Brunei on the day of the crime, the appearances are just that: appearances.

But, you know very well that a skillful prosecutor can
seduce a jury into ignoring the facts in favor of a narrative that turns out to
be more satisfying. See the trial of one O. J. Simpson.

It is always possible to cherry-pick facts that appear to support a
narrative. As long as you do not allow reality to enter the picture, you will
have be able to persuade some people that the narrative is a higher truth.

For example, Kotkin points out that the tech oligarchs are
in love with the climate change and global warming narrative. They support
policies that they believe will delay the arrival of the apocalypse but are
unconcerned with the effects that green policies visit on the less fortunate.

Not
that there’s anything cynical about the tech oligarchy’s commitment to green
policies. It is entirely sincere – the oligarchs really do believe, as do many
liberal, Democratic types, that they are fighting the good fight. But that
doesn’t mitigate the effects of their worldview.

Kotkin continues:

Perhaps
nothing separates the oligarchy from the rest of business than its support for
Obama’s climate-change policies. Many industries see these policies as a direct threat to their very existence, but this means
little to moguls, who can shift their energy needs to cheaper locales, such as
the Pacific Northwest or the South. In California, such policies have less an
impact on the temperate coast than in the less glamorous interior. As one recent study found, the summer electrical bills in
rich, liberal and temperate Marin come to $250 monthly, while in impoverished,
hotter Madera, the average is twice as high.

And also,

Yet
behind the media glitz, California is increasingly a bifurcated state, divided
between a glamorous software- and media-based economy concentrated in certain
coastal areas, and a declining, and increasingly impoverished, interior.
Overall, nearly a quarter of Californians live in poverty, the highest
percentage of any state, including Mississippi, and, according to a
recent United
Way study, close to one in three people are barely able to pay their
bills.